Myriad Universes - Infinity's Prism Part 31

Kira Nerys sat on a spartan bunk molded to the far wall, her back pressed into the corner of the cell, hands flat against a plastifoam mattress. There were contusions on her face and neck, bruising around the skin visible on her wrists. The Bajoran's eyes were hard, though, not those of a dispirited woman but someone tempered and annealed by the attacks upon her. Hardened, like sharpened steel, Dax imagined.

"I'll give you nothing, slave," said the Bajoran, her voice hollow and weary. "Don't waste your time."

The Trill produced a hand computer from her pocket and scanned the room. The device chimed softly and she nodded to herself. "We are not being monitored. I took care of it."

The words had barely left Ezri's mouth when Kira exploded into motion and rocketed off the bed, punching the helot hard in the sternum. Dax stumbled, breath gusting out of her lungs, and she fell against the wall.

"Nerys..." She coughed out the name and looked up, seeing Kira standing over her, her fists in tight b.a.l.l.s, her whole body vibrating with barely caged fury.

"You stupid lapdog b.i.t.c.h!" growled the prisoner. "We trusted you! You were supposed to protect us!" She seemed to become aware of herself, and the tension in her faded a little. The Bajoran sank back onto the bed.

Dax dragged herself off the floor, tasting the tang of blood in her mouth. "I did the best I could..."

"Your best?" Kira's voice was a razor. "Your best got a dozen of my men murdered, my ship captured-"

"Do not blame me for your failure!" Ezri snapped back at her fiercely. "O'Brien found you, despite all my attempts to divert the Defiance away from this system! He picked up your ship because you spent too long waiting at Ajir! Why did you divert from the plan? You should have been long gone."

"I..." Kira's face creased with emotion, and she shot a glance out at the force field, to the cell across the corridor where her lover was being held. "Skrain. I waited for Skrain..."

"And that is how O'Brien tracked you. The ion trail pooled and the energy return tripped Defiance's sensors." Dax shook her head. "You should have gone on without him."

The other woman's shoulders drooped. "I thought it was worth the risk."

Ezri mirrored her actions. "You were wrong." She reached out and placed a hand on the Bajoran's arm.

It was evening in Africa, and the Great Palace was lit by a stream of orange-purple light reflected off the clouds from the setting sun. There was a cool breeze in the air, and Bashir tasted the scent of an oncoming rainstorm. He stood with his hands on the carved stone of the bal.u.s.trade, looking out over the wide expanse of the savannah.

Khan joined him, adopting a similar stance. "Julian. I confess, I did not expect to see you here again so soon."

"Forgive me, lord, but this is one of the few places where...I can find a moment to hear myself think."

Noonien Singh chuckled softly. "The demands upon a leader are sometimes his greatest test, my brother. The key is to know what truly requires your attention and turn the full force of your will to it in the most opportune moment."

For a moment, the princeps was distracted, barely even registering the counsel's ready advice. He nodded absently.

The Khan sensed it immediately. "Bashir!" he snapped, and Julian was jerked out of his reverie by the hard edge in the voice. "Are you so overwhelmed that you ignore even me?"

The princeps colored and shook his head. "No, my Khan. I am sorry. It is just...in recent days, events are causing me to consider things that I have previously left alone."

"What sort of things?" demanded the hologram.

"Questions of loyalty. And the matter of the ship we discovered in Ajir's halo zone."

"The ship," repeated Khan, pausing as the counsel tapped into the Defiance's database for more background.

Bashir nodded. "A relic from the past. A craft called the Botany Bay."

And then the program did something that Julian had never seen happen before, not in all his time as an officer of the Khanate. Noonien Singh's image froze in place, every gesture and tiny realistic motion of him suddenly suspended, turning him into a perfectly carved statue.

The princeps was confused, and hesitantly reached out a hand to touch the counsel, then thought better of it. Some sort of system malfunction? It hardly seemed possible. The moment the name of the old derelict had left his lips, something had been triggered deep in the heart of the holographic matrix.

In another heartbeat the moment pa.s.sed and the counsel jerked back to life, but now the Khan's expression had altered, turning hard and serious. "Julian, listen to me carefully. Until direct orders arrive from my grandson himself, you are to isolate that vessel and everyone on board it. The Botany Bay is to be contained at all costs. Do you understand me?"

Bashir gave a slow nod. "I understand, my lord." Bashir had never heard of a counsel giving a ranking princeps an order before, although there were always rumors about the holo-programs and the length of their reach. He recalled the elder Sisko once hinting darkly of a ship whose command crew had been killed and whose counsel had activated automatically and a.s.sumed the role of captaincy for itself.

"Do it now," said Khan, and before Julian could say any more, the palace balcony melted away, reshaping itself back into the bare walls of the holo-chamber.

Immediately, Bashir's communicator headset chimed and he tapped it with a finger. "This is the princeps."

"Adjutant, lord," Jacob's voice was tight and urgent in his earpiece. "An encrypted subs.p.a.ce transmission was just sent directly from the counsel chamber to Quadrant Command on Earth.... Is there a problem? Something we should be aware of?"

Julian felt unsteady, giddy, as if the world had suddenly started to move around him, out of his control. "No," he said distantly.

"Very well, sir." He heard the doubts in his aide's tone. "In the meantime, engineering corps informs the command deck that we are ready to move to warp velocities on your order. The prize crew is standing by to board the derelict and take it under power. Shall we proceed?"

"Not yet." Bashir's answer seemed to be coming from a different person. He felt disconnected, his thoughts turning again to Shaun Christopher and his people. To the woman, Robinson. The counsel's abrupt reaction absorbed him. It seemed almost...unreal. He had to know why the hologram had reacted that way. What did the sudden response to the name Botany Bay mean?

All at once, Bashir wanted nothing less than to grasp the secrets of the sleepers, and to know more about Rain Robinson in particular.

Dax's eyes flicked to the hand computer; the sensor returns still read in the null end of the spectrum. "What did you tell Squad Leader Tiber?"

"Not much. A few choice suggestions about the kind of farm animals his mother might have had s.e.xual intercourse with." She chuckled stiffly, over a jolt of pain from her broken ribs. "These ubers get very irate when you make fun of their breeding. It's easy to push their b.u.t.tons if you know how."

Ubers. It was actually a term from an old Terran language, Dax recalled, a name that had somehow slipped into pejorative use by all those who stood against the Khan and his arrogant kindred. Just to say the word aloud in the halls of this ship would see Bashir turn the dominae key on her for a disciplinary reprimand. "You should be careful, Nerys. Tiber hates nonhumans with a pa.s.sion. He would rip you open just to amuse himself, if the chance was offered to him."

"It won't be, though. At least, not yet," the Bajoran replied. "I'm Kira Nerys, remember? Enemy of the Khan, dissident and terrorist. My death's going to be nice and public. I'll bet they're already planning it. Up against the ruins of the bantaca spire in Ashalla, a firing squad or a beheading, maybe." She sniffed. "Perhaps it will do some good. All my blood on the stones, color-corrected and broadcast wideband across every planet of the Khanate. Perhaps it will make some people think."

"Nerys, I will do my best to find a way to get you out of here, Dukat and the others as well-"

Kira kept speaking as if she hadn't heard Dax. "But that's not likely, is it? All those worlds out there, they cling to Khan's hems like abused children. All of them, beaten and downtrodden so many times that they've come to think of it as a gesture of love, like some kind of honor." She spat the word. "Nothing but apathy and slave-state minds. Too scared to resist. Too weak."

Dax sighed. "Servitude is all they know. Most of them have never lived in true freedom."

"You have." Kira prodded Ezri in the chest, where her symbiont lay. "Dax has. You know how it feels. And you know the humans have no right to take that from us."

"No," said the Trill. "No, they do not. But they do not care about what is right. They care about their destiny. They believe in it, to the exclusion of all else. 'One day, a Khan will rule the galaxy.'" She quoted the human axiom with rote diction.

"Not while I'm still breathing," grated Kira. "We could break their grip if only we had the numbers!" She shook her head. "Khan Noonien Singh's greatest crime was convincing billions that they were inferior. If we could rally those people, make them see..." The woman ran out of energy and her voice trailed off. "I hate that man with every fire of my pagh. Khan was dead before I was born and still I hate him. There's nowhere in the quadrant that b.a.s.t.a.r.d's shadow doesn't fall. But it's too late now. Too late for me." She sniffed, attempting to recover some of her poise. "When's my execution, then? I'm surprised we're not down there now. Or is Sisko going to keep me for himself?"

Dax shook her head. "Kira, we still haven't left the Ajir system."

"What? Why are we still here?"

In low and urgent tones, Ezri began to explain about the derelict, and of what the Botany Bay might represent.

4.

"Shaun," said O'Donnel, gripping his shoulder tightly. "We need to talk. Right this second."

Instinctively, Christopher glanced up from his work at the environmental control console and looked to see where the troopers from the Defiance were standing. Two of them were across the cryo-chamber at the main hatch, like black-clad sentinels either side of the steel door. He hadn't seen them speak, not once since they had come on board. The thickset men looked like thugs with a molecule-thin layer of respectability sprayed on over the top. Shaun couldn't help but wonder what kind of s.p.a.ce vessel-scratch that, starship-would need men like that in her crew.

"Hachi," he said, turning to Tomino. "Shannon and me are gonna take a look at the regulators. Keep an eye on the gauges here, will you? Sing out if the needles start to twitch." He tapped the panel and gave the man a nod.

"Gotcha." Tomino's look in return showed he understood exactly what was going on.

Shannon moved to the snarl of cryo-tank ducting between the first and second sleeper bays and ducked down into a narrow maintenance crawlway, making a play of using her penlight to examine the tubes. Shaun crouched and joined her, examining a perfectly serviceable joint for a fault he knew wasn't there. Among the hissing, grumbling pipes it would be difficult for anyone to hear them talking, and the captain had the certain sense that everything they did was being scrutinized by Bashir's crew.

"Where's that doctor of theirs?" he said quietly.

She pointed at the floor. "On H Deck with Reggie and Rudy, checking the tube seals. He said he wanted to make sure we weren't going to lose any more."

Shaun nodded. Along with himself, Rain, Shannon, and Hachi, Warren and Laker had been woken up by the DY-102's auto-revival sequence before Amoros had been able to deactivate it. At first, Christopher had thought the Defiance crew might be responsible for the deaths of the five whose pods were found dark and lifeless, but soon he realized that the ones they had lost had been through systems malfunctions, through normal wear and tear along the course of the ship's voyage.

One death for every seventy or so years we traveled through the dark, he mused. Was it worth that price?

Brown. Tyler. McShane. Summerfield. Jones. He'd known them all. Everyone on Botany Bay was like family-that was what a crisis did to you: it made people forge those kind of bonds-but for now they couldn't afford to mourn. Not until they knew what the h.e.l.l was going on.

Shaun sighed. He wished Jack were here. He could have used his old mentor's guidance right about now; but Jackson Roykirk had stayed behind, given up his seat. He was centuries away from them now, gone behind a veil of time and s.p.a.ce that left Christopher feeling more alone than he had ever thought possible. He realized Shannon was waiting for him to speak. "What about Rain?" he asked.

"She went over there." O'Donnel jerked a thumb at the hull. "To the Defiance."

"What?" He glanced over his shoulder, to see if his reflexive snarl had caught the attention of the guards. "You let her suit up and walk over to another ship? Is our atmosphere gear even still viable?"

"Didn't exactly have much choice," she snapped back at him, nodding in the direction of the big men. "And she wanted to go."

"Yeah, of course she did." Shaun shook his head. "Dammit, that girl treats everything like it's some kinda game. What if Bashir decides he doesn't want to let her come back?"

Shannon frowned. "Likely, judging from the way he was looking at her. But that's not the thing. She didn't use a suit, Shaun. None of them did. They didn't EVA over from their boat."

"What are you talking about?" He knew for certain they hadn't docked with the other ship.

"I don't know what it was they used, but Bashir just talked into that headset of his and the pair of them...disintegrated. Right in front of me." She shook her head. "That blond bruiser, Tiber? He laughed when he saw the look on my face. Said they were teleported back to the ship."

"That's impossible," he retorted, but O'Donnel's hard gaze said otherwise. "Holy Hannah. What's that thing that Professor Clarke said?"

"Any technology sufficiently advanced will be indistinguishable from magic."

"Ray guns. Aliens. Matter transporters. What else?" He shot a look at the guards. "Mind readers?"

"I'll admit, that Bashir looks like he can see right through me..." Shannon shook her head grimly. "But I'd say not. If they knew what we were thinking, we'd be dead."

Something in her words brought him up short. "Why would they do that?" He leaned closer. "Shan? What aren't you telling me?"

Rain blinked and did a double take as the doors slid back into the walls to reveal a striking desert landscape of towering rustred b.u.t.tes and canyons. "Whoa." She stepped through, under an arch of pale metal, and walked slowly forward. The doorway appeared to have deposited her on the flat top of one of the mesas, the level crown of the mountain the size of a basketball court. With the bowl of a sharp blue sky above, it was almost like riding among the clouds.

"I could do that for you, if you wish it," Bashir said, pouring a gla.s.s of wine.

Rain colored slightly, realizing that she'd been thinking aloud. "Really?"

"Oh yes." The Defiance's commander stood by a small table covered in cutlery and gla.s.sware that seemed to have been transplanted from some upscale restaurant. "This is a synthetic environment, completely malleable, completely adjustable. I can program it to reflect the real or the unreal." He looked up. "Computer? Nighttime."

Instantly the blue sky became a black curtain dappled with stars. Candles solidified on the table, issuing a warm glow. "That's pretty cool," Rain said, attempting to hold in her instinct to gawk. "Do you get ESPN on this thing?"

He gave her a curious smile. "I do not understand."

"Never mind." She approached the table, expecting him to seat her-she'd dated guys who did the 'gentleman' thing before and she knew the drill-but Bashir didn't. He took his own chair and nodded at hers, as if he expected her to automatically know her place.

Rain sat, keeping her face neutral. "I've gotta say, I'm surprised you asked me, uh, over."

"Indeed?"

"Yeah. I was worried the age thing might make it a problem getting dates. Not many guys go for women in their late three-hundreds." The glib comment tripped off her tongue, but to be honest, she was nervous in the extreme. The humor was a defense mechanism.

Bashir chuckled and placed the gla.s.s of wine in front of her before pouring one for himself. "You are here, Ms. Robinson, because you are the only person from the Botany Bay who did not look at me with outright suspicion and fear. Has that changed?"

"That...teleport thing of yours was a bit of a shock," she admitted, not wanting to say that the stark transition had almost made her throw up. "But I'm not quaking in my boots, if that's what you're asking." She sipped the wine; it was a heavy red with a thick, caramel aftertaste to it. "I'm a scientist," she continued. "The unknown is my business. I guess right now, that's you."

"And your companions? Captain Christopher and the others? Do they feel that way as well?"

"Doubt it," she replied. "Don't get me wrong, Shaun's a stand-up guy, and he knows his stuff. But he's military, you know? A bit stiff."

Bashir raised an eyebrow. "What does that make me, then?"

"You're different," Rain admitted, unsure where her words were leading her. "You've got more of an aristocrat thing going on. It's cute."

He helped himself to food from a cl.u.s.ter of silver servers and Rain followed suit, careful to pick things that seemed familiar. "Captain Christopher and his crew have been very guarded about the origins of your voyage," Bashir continued. "Why is that?"

Rain shrugged the question off. "Like I said. Military. Shaun, Reggie, Rudy, they're all ex-air force or navy, all NASA monkeys. Astronauts," she added, seeing a flash of confusion on the man's face. "You know the kind."

"I do," he admitted. "But you are not like them. You are a...civilian."

Bashir leaned forward, and Rain was struck by just how much bigger he was than her. Not just taller or broader, but denser. It was odd; it seemed like the Defiance was run by a crew of line-backers. She nodded at his statement and went to the wine again, barely wetting her lips with it. Careful, girl, she told herself. He's charming, but you know next to nothing about him. "How about your ship?" she asked. "You have civilian staff on board?"

"In a manner of speaking. There is a contingent of helots on board to a.s.sist with the minor duties."

"Helots? I don't know what that means."

Bashir paused. "I suppose you could call them auxiliaries. Servants, that sort of thing."

"Right." Rain sounded out the word, uncertain of how to take his explanation. Maybe she had been closer to the truth than she realized when she called him an aristocrat. Maybe the Earth of this era had some kind of feudal government system. Bashir could be a lord or a baron. Robinson didn't want to dwell on what deeper meaning that might have.

"I have been giving a lot of thought to you," he went on, nodding to himself. "I want to know more about you, about your time. To be honest with you, I am going against protocol just having this conversation..." He gestured with his winegla.s.s. "But I have read as much as I can about twenty-first-century history. Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by that era. And now, to actually meet someone who lived there..." Bashir broke into a boyish, incongruous grin. "I have so many questions."